You can do this

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Witness the role of willpower in your daily life: From the moment the alarm sounds in the morning, it's only by sheer determination that you rouse yourself from the warm sheets into the still-dark morning. You grit your teeth when the barista takes 6 minutes to fill your coffee order—never mind those $200 shoes you talk yourself out of buying or the fries you force yourself to leave on your plate at lunch. It's no wonder that by the time 6 PM rolls around, you're waging World War III on your husband for forgetting to pick up the milk on his way home. Again.

Our lives are full of temptations that tax our self-control and drain our willpower, but a growing body of research says you can make it through the day without losing your cool, and it isn't as hard as you think. First, you need to realize that doing anything you don't want to do—suppressing irritation at your mother-in-law, fighting an impulse to do something you shouldn't, completing a task when you want to quit—draws on the same storehouse of willpower.

But help is here: According to Roy Baumeister, PhD, director of social psychology at Florida State University, willpower functions like a muscle. It can be fatigued by overuse, but it can also be strengthened to make you more productive, less stressed, and happier. All you need are a few healthy habits to keep your willpower tank on full.